


take us down and all apart

by ohmygodwhy



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Borderline Personality Disorder, Character Study, First Kiss, Gen, Growing Up Together, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Linear Narrative, Oikawa Tooru's Knee Injury, Relationship Study, vague csa warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-05 02:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11004504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy
Summary: It’s childish to say that he wants it for himself—to be first, to be best—but he does. It’s selfish, but this is a competition. You don’t become the best by being nice. (When he says this to Hajime, he looks at him and says “You’re not a mean person, Tooru. You don’t have to change yourself to win.”)or: tooru grows up, and stars shine until they burn themselves out





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> school's finally out!!! so i have plenty of time to project all over my fav!!! but for real i love this boy?? it's been so long,,,,,,,anyways pls do read the tags, there's a vague allusion to csa warning, not explored as much in this chapter as it will be in the next one (not explicitly at all tho) so do be safe!!

 

 

The thing about stars is that they’re very very far away from Earth. The source of the light you’re seeing could be dead by now, just an echo of the real thing, and you’d never know.

When Tooru was young, and he yearned to see the real thing instead of glow-in-the-dark plastic on the ceiling, he would stack up big big books and climb up onto them, stretching up on the very tips of his toes, leaning on the windowsill as far as he could reach, and gaze at the stars, and the stars would gaze back. They would twinkle, like they were winking at him. He would try to wink back, but he wasn’t very good at it.

Sometimes he would stand like that for a long time, until his feet cramped up or his eyes got heavy, entranced by the universe just outside his house. Most times he would wish he could fly up there himself, like a shooting star in reverse. Used to wish aliens would come down like they do in the movies, and take him somewhere far away. Other times, he would switch from staring at the sky to staring at the ground, two stories below.

His mother finds him like that one night, pulls him away from the window and tells him to go to bed, it’s the middle of the night, what is he doing up so late?

He listens, but he never does give up his habit.

 

The thing about Iwaizumi is that he can’t pinpoint an exact day, and exact moment in time when they met, like other people tell stories about. He’s a constant, someone he can’t ever really remember existing without. He knows, realistically, that there was a time before Iwaizumi—before Hajime—lonely windows and wishes on stars, but it just. Doesn’t seem important enough to remember.

(He remembers a lot sometimes, and sometimes he doesn’t remember a lot, stuff he thinks he probably should. So when kids at school are talking, huddled around a desk or on the playground, sometimes he kind of…makes stuff up. It’s not lying, he’s not lying, he’s just. Telling a story. Something that could be true if he tries hard enough.

_Oh yeah, I went there when I was little, I almost fell into the river actually_ , when he’s never heard of the place in his life, or _my uncle does that too! he’s really nice, though,_ when he only has one uncle and he hasn’t seen him in years.

Only little things that help him stay in the conversation instead of hovering on the outside—similar experiences make for easy conversation, and he learns from a young age that he hates being on the outside.

The truth is that most of the time he doesn’t remember what his dad looked like or when he started liking stars or what the day was like when he first met Hajime—and plus, he thinks it must’ve been pretty boring if he can’t remember any of it, so he fills in the gaps himself, touching up what’s already there and painting in the rest.)

Besides, he still stares out the window and he still wishes on stars, so not much has changed there. The only difference is now he has someone to tell all his Space Facts to, who will listen and not just pat his head and say that’s nice, Tooru. He does call him a nerd and tell him he’s way too obsessed with that stuff, but he still listens. Hajime is a nice person like that.

Tooru doesn’t think he’s that nice of a person, his mom's touches are light and distant where Hajime’s parents touch him softly and often, but they’re friends anyways.

Tooru is grateful.

 

He’s lived in this house all his life. His parents moved in a few months before his sister was born, he was told somewhere, with happy prospects of a happy life, and they’ve been here ever since.

They put up the stars when he was young. He doesn’t know when. They’ve always just been there.

When he learned more about them, their lives and deaths and positions in the universe, he would drag the ladder from the garage into his room and climb up to fix them, pulling them off the ceiling and sticking them back on with reverence fit only for sacred objects, and organize them as best he could into the proper constellations, small fingers clumsy but diligent.

That’s something he remembers clearly, all of the time. Plastic held gently in his hands, ladder shaky under his feet. He’d been afraid of falling off, but he climbed up anyways. When he was done, he dragged the ladder back out without anyone seeing, and turned off the lights and laid flat on his back on the floor and gazed up at them.

The thing about stars is that they’re very very far away from Earth, but these were closer. These were his.

He would show Hajime later, point out their secret messages and help him trace them with his finger in the air like they were reaching towards the heavens. His friend never caught the same affinity for it that Tooru did, but he liked them all the same.

“It’s like you have your own universe in here,” he tells him, and Tooru laughs, because there’s no way he could fit an entire universe into his bedroom, that’s just silly, but the idea catches all the same.

(Always off in his own universe, he hears his mom gossiping with her friends, hears the hairdresser laugh as her nails dig carelessly into the back of his neck. So absent-minded, head always stuck in the clouds.

In the stars, his mother corrects with a laugh, and Tooru feels his face burn. He’s not sure why he’s ashamed, but he is. Childish, still has those plastic stars on his ceiling.

No matter what she says, though, the stars never do come off.)

 

He hears somewhere that everyone is made up of stardust.

He doesn’t know the science behind it, but it sounds very nice.

Everyone is made up the remnants but not everybody shines like one. Some people shine so bright it hurts his eyes to look at.

Tooru doesn’t know where he falls between the two, but he thinks that he doesn’t shine bright enough to hurt people’s eyes, but that he’s so great an opposite of shining that people look away anyways. They whisper when Tooru’s mom drags him through the store, her hand tight around his wrist like she can’t stand to touch his hands.

When she does touch him, the movements are distant and mechanic, like she’s copying someone else but not getting it down all the way. She smooths his hair on the back of his neck, and he shivers.  

He’s at Hajime’s house when he sees his first volleyball game. On the TV screen, the players shine brighter than anything he’s ever seen, and despite the fact that he’s something dirty and bad, he watches them fly and thinks: I want that.

 

The thing about space is that it’s all-encompassing. People like to act like the Earth is the center of everything, like we are important in the grand scheme of it all, but Tooru knows better.

Earth is tiny compared to their sun, and their sun is tiny compared to other suns, bigger stars. He knows this because one of the books at the library - the big space book he would always abandon his classmates for to snatch up before anybody else did - had this page that unfolded into a bigger page, with size comparisons of all the planets in their solar system, and then another one with different sized stars. It was always cool and laminated under his fingers. He liked to trace Saturn’s rings and wonder what it would be like to burn like a sun.

Space was so big that it filled him up, drew him in and wrapped him up, safe and tight in its grasp. Nothing can breathe in space, but it somehow always made him breathe easier.

(He’s told, later, that this obsession is a coping mechanism. He just thinks it saved him.)

Volleyball, like space and the stars and blackholes, encompasses his life. He falls into it like he’s coming home, and it welcomes him just the same.

It’s more difficult. He has to work his body into shape and teach his hands to control the ball like he wants. He bends his fingers back when he tries to spike the ball, once, and almost cries about it, but then Hajime is grasping at his aching fingers and holding them to his lips like Tooru had seen his mom do to his, and suddenly he feels better.

Hajime is there with him, of course, learning right alongside him. He’s more enthusiastic about this than he is about the stars—it’s more his style, all movement and energy and dirty hands and knees when they fall and get back up again, bruised forearms and balls to the head.

Tooru has a lot of moments to define Hajime, but his most favorite one is this:

It’s the night after their first real game of middle school—or ever, for them. They didn’t do much, but their team won. Hajime’s mom drives them home, and they eat their Victory Dinner as quick as they can and rush down to the park to practice some more.

Hajime almost forgets his shoes in the rush; the only thing that stops him from running all the way down the street with bare feet is his mom’s exasperated laugh and a call of “Hajime, you’re a little old to be getting your feet all dirty like that”.

While his friend is busy pulling his shoes on, grumbling in embarrassment, Hajime’s mom ruffles Tooru’s hair the way she ruffles her son’s and says “make sure he doesn’t run off like a five year old again any time soon, okay?” with a fond little smile that makes something in his chest ache.

“Okay,” he agrees, and Hajime just grumbles louder.

When they make it to the park, the sun is far west, low in the sky, just barely peeking through the trees. The moon isn’t full, but it’s pretty all the same, its faint outline just barely noticeable in the sky.

They bump the ball back and forth, and they talk about the game—how exciting it was! How cool it was to watch up close! And their team won! If they keep working and getting better they could be the ones playing for real and winning for real.

Tooru wants to be captain. So does almost everybody else, but Tooru thinks he wants it most of all. They’ve had it worked out for a while now, he and Hajime: Tooru would be captain, and Hajime would be his second in command. Hajime had never liked too much weight on his shoulders, but he was strong. He always knew how to stop Tooru from doing stupid things like trying to climb onto the roof or swim to the deep end of the lake.

So he’d be like…the backup, he vice-captain, and Tooru would be number 1. So does almost everybody else, but Tooru knows he wants it most of all, more than he’s ever wanted anything.

He admits this to Hajime later, after they’ve worn themselves out and spread out on the grass under a tree. Hajime is on his stomach, head propped up in his hands, but Tooru is looking at the stars.

“You don’t have to act like it’s some secret,” Hajime says. “Everyone wants to be number one.”

“But it’s more than that,” Tooru says, and he doesn’t know why but it is, “I _need_ to.”

He feels Hajime look at him for along moment. He thinks his friend can always see right through his skin and into his heart like no one else can.

“Alright,” he says, “I know you can do it.”

“You’ll be my co-captain, right?” Tooru says, head tilted so he can see the way Hajime’s eyes look under the light of the stars.

“Of course,” Hajime snorts, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Tooru smiles. He’s happy.

 

Spring cleaning isn’t something his family ever really does, but Tooru is starting high school in just a little bit and his sister thinks that’s the perfect time to clean out the house—get rid of the clutter, she says, even though it isn’t even spring and the only place that’s really cluttered is Tooru’s room and the garage. The kitchen is clean and clinical. Tooru doesn’t go into his mom’s room.

It’s a ‘new chapter of his life’, so she comes over one day with trash bags and dusters and a frowning Takeru to help. He only frowns until Tooru turns it into a game—whoever cleans more of the living room gets their pick of ice cream from the convenience store near the school, courtesy of his sister.

She lets Tooru clean his room by himself. Hovers at the doorway like it’s a threshold she’s afraid to cross. He doesn’t know why, but brushes it off as she goes to start on the garage—good luck with that, he tells her. She’s always been a weirdo anyways, so it’s nothing new.

He goes through his closet, pulls out old clothes that don’t fit anymore and textbooks he doesn’t need—things he can give to Takeru, he thinks absently.

He finds a flashlight under his mattress. He tried to learn morse code a few years back, but gave up when the batteries ran out.

On his desk, buried beneath notebooks and notes passed between he and Hajime during class, is the big space book from the library. He checked it out once, when he was younger, and kind of just…forgot to take it back. He’d been afraid for the longest time that the librarian was gonna show up at his house and demand it back, but nothing ever happened, of course. He was just being silly, stupid.

It’s been awhile since he’s looked through it, been awhile since he’s even thought about the thing. He still looks out windows and wishes on stars, still wishes he could float up to space sometimes, but his life’s been consumed with other stuff. He hasn’t had the chance to spend time tracing Saturn’s rings or read about black holes and their mysteries.

He cracks the cover open, skimming through the table of contents. He always did that. Muscle memory. He’s read the whole thing multiple times, but he always liked the section about stars the most.

He’s flipping through the pages, heart hammering in his chest—he needs to see it suddenly, the bright displays and pretty colors of a supernova.

The page falls open, his saving grace displayed on two worn pages, and he lets out a sigh of relief. His heart settles. His lungs fill with air. He feels tears stinging his eyes. He’s alright. He’s okay, now. Why is he okay now?

“Tooru?” he hears his sister ask, and jumps, slamming the book shut on instinct. “Are you okay?”

He blinks, “Yeah, I’m fine.” His voice sounds shaky, but his heart is steady.

She doesn’t look convinced, but glances up at his ceiling instead of pressing. There’s something delicate in the way she stares up at them. She steps only a few paces into his room, hand resting on the doorframe as if she needs something to keep her from stepping completely into his universe.

“Are you gonna take those down?” she asks.

Something desperately anxious shoots through him at the thought of an empty ceiling.

“No,” he says too quickly. Makes himself take a silent breath and smile, “No, I still kinda like them.”

His sister looks… delicate, again. Like that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Still, she just shrugs, forcing whatever weight off of her shoulder and onto Tooru’s floor. People do that a lot in his family, he thinks—brushing things off and changing the subject. He thinks he’s gotten pretty good at it, himself.

“Alright, alright,” she says, teasing, “If you wanna stay five years old forever.”

He rolls his eyes, plays his appropriate part.

She drags him out to the garage to help her clean, and the stars stay on the ceiling.

 

He wants to be the best, but it’s so so hard to be the best.

He works hard for every scrap of talent he can grasp, spends hours and hours perfecting his sets (he likes setting, likes playing the game like an instrument, turning the wheels of a well-oiled machine, he likes giving his teammates what they need to succeed, likes seeing them blossom into the best they can be), pours himself into everything he does.

He works so hard, and so it’s so damn frustrating when there are people who’ve barely had to work at all to get to where they are.

Oikawa Tooru is not a genius. He works twice as hard because of it, molds himself into something better than he is. He knows he’s good at what he does, because he’s worked hard to get there. And he knows, he knows it’s childish to say it isn’t fair, but it isn’t—people like Ushijima or Tobio have what he has, and they sacrifice close to nothing.

It’s childish to say that he wants it for himself—to be first, to be best—but he does. It’s selfish, but this is a competition. You don’t become the best by being nice. (When he says this to Hajime, he looks at him and says “You’re not a mean person, Tooru. You don’t have to change yourself to win.”)

(He thinks that there’s nothing nice about him—his smiles are too fake and he thinks he doesn’t like the girls at his school as much as he should but he smiles at them anyways; he’s ruthless on the court and he hates not having the upper-hand, hates not being in control, he’s annoying, loves praise but hates fake flattery. He’s not a nice person, no matter what Hajime says; he doesn’t know how to be a nice person.)

Middle school becomes high school and things get bigger. Things get serious—this isn’t scraping their knees at the park or watching plastic stars. This is their future, this is the national court, this is everything he’s worked for. It’s a lot.

Some days he’s so full—of knowledge and wants and memories and dreams—that it overflows, seeps through his skin and into his voice, his laugh, his serves. He speaks without thinking and works without stopping because there’s just _so much_ of him. Sometimes it comes out in tears—he was young and afraid of shadows and the stars were hazy above him and sometimes crushing anxiety is all he is and sometimes he doesn’t even _know_ why he cries, he just cries—that he buries deep in his pillow. He’s so full of everything that he can barely keep it in sometimes, or can barely get it out of him.

Other times he’s empty, his bones hollow like a bird’s, his lungs free to take in as much air as they please, nothing forcing them to compact inside his ribcage. There’s nothing weighing him down on these days, nothing bleeding through his clothes. He’s light and functioning like he should be, like other people can—it’s not hard to get up in the morning and it’s not hard to stop training. He’s good. He’s talented. His talent won’t go away overnight, so of course he should get some rest and continue tomorrow. Hajime won’t just leave because of some dumb joke he makes, childhood friends don’t just abandon you like that. He’s okay.

Other empty days are not so good, leave him missing something that’s been taken from his chest, something he doesn’t remember but _knows_ was there. His bones are hollow, like a bird’s, but they are also brittle, one wrong move away from crumbling into dust. He is empty, but feels so heavy that he can barely jump high enough to serve over the net, can barely lift his arms enough to set the ball. He wonders if he would flutter to the floor like tissue paper if someone pushed him over, or land hard like a bowling ball. He’s tempted to annoy Hajime, just to test it out, but he doesn’t. Hajime doesn’t shove him on these days, like he can somehow tell just by looking at him.

He thinks it’s really cruel, to show him what he could be if he wasn’t like this, to show him how easy it really is to walk and talk and smile like everybody else—other people don’t practice their laugh in the mirror to see if it’s believable enough—only to thrust him back into full full full or empty like some old dead thing.

He wishes he wasn’t like this.

 

He loves his high school team to pieces, to the furthest star he can think of and all the way back. They’re all amazing, in separate ways. When he watches them play, he understand how people must be made of the same stuff stars are.

Hajime—Iwaizumi, now, because they’ve dropped first names at school years ago (at home he’s still Hajime, and Oikawa is Tooru, but on the court they aren’t children anymore)—is, of course, the brightest. Tooru’s definitely biased, but he won’t ever take it back or think otherwise.

When he jumps to spike the ball it looks like he’s flying.

Which is why it’s so frustrating to lose. And they do lose. The six stronger players make the stronger team, and all their players are strong, so maybe it’s Tooru who isn’t strong enough, he doesn’t know.

When he trains, he trains himself ragged and thin, strung out like something old that’s been uncoiled. It’s one two three four five six seven eight nine—slip, it doesn’t hit the middle, start over, one two three, up to ten.

And then it’s one two three up to fifteen next year and fifteen up to twenty and then it’s twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty when they lose to Shiratorizawa again in their first year and Ushijima looks down at him with those stupid impassive eyes.

They tell him that he’s a star, even when they lose, bright and forever burning. But the thing about stars is that eventually, they die. Burn themselves out.

The fall happens in the middle of his second year of high school, working their way up only to be crushed back into the dirt under Shiratorizawa’s heel again.

Tooru blames himself, even though he knows that there are a million factors that went into it and he certainly wasn’t the only one on the court, he isn’t Kageyama after all, but still. Old doubts creep up on him—he needs to get better, he needs to work harder.

He sends Iwaizumi a series of texts that say he’s home safe in his bed, right about to go to sleep actually!! before he puts his phone face down on the bench and rolls the cart of volleyballs onto the court.

Twenty serves this time, because he’s tired but not too tired. If he messes up, he’ll start over.

He makes it to five before he hits out of bounds, makes it to ten next before his hand slips, make it to twelve before he jumps wrong and he knows something is off as soon as he hits the ball. Lands with all of his weight on his right leg.

It twists awkwardly, with a pop and some kind of horrifying crack, and then his knee is on fire and he’s on the ground, clutching at it tight tight where he’s crouched around it. It throbs angrily under his hands; he thinks he makes some kind of horrible screaming sound, but he also thinks that there’s no way that sound came from him. His heart beats like a dying bird’s.

The gym is silent.

His lungs won’t work suddenly, throat dry like it’s lined with sandpaper, heart pounding in his head like some kind of clocktower that won’t stop ringing. His vision flickers. He can’t breathe, hands trembling.

He hasn’t had a panic attack in years, he thinks vaguely. He feels like he’s going to die—if he’s fucked up his knee, he’s going to die. Everything will be ruined, the one thing he’s poured all of himself into will be ruined and he probably really will die.

He tries to stand on shaking legs. Makes some kind of noise when his knee gives out a second time, fire shooting up his thigh.

Somehow, over the course of a good thirty minutes, he makes it to the bench and grabs at his phone. It takes him three tries to grasp it in his hands. He’s floating somewhere outside of his body, but he watches himself mindlessly scroll through his recent contacts—Hajime is the first on the list. His thumb hovers over his name, the artificial light of the screen harsh against his eyes.

It takes him a very long time to convince himself to just call him. Hajime will hate him, he thinks somewhere, but Hajime will come for him anyways. He always does.

The thing about stars is that they almost always drag something into their orbit, whether they try to or not.

He doesn’t think himself a star in any sense, too dirty and fake to shine with his own light, but he thinks that he’s definitely pulled Hajime in. Vaguely, he thinks that he’s sorry, because Hajime probably wasn’t planning on someone forcing him into their orbit and ruining his life. But here they are.

The phone rings three times. On the fourth ring, Hajime picks up.

“Hajime,” he says. Chokes. Has to breathe deep and steady as his ribs collapse in on themselves, “Can you come pick me up?”

 

Tooru has always been good at watching people, at picking up every little twitch or frown or dart of their eyes as they talk—especially when they’re talking to him, or maybe when they’re talking to others, he doesn’t know. Hajime calls it kinda creepy and the coaches say he has a gift, something able to asses the other team and find their weakest links and then hit and hit and hit at them until they shatter. He’s very good at shattering things.

He has all of Hajime’s expressions down flat. He knows what it means when his mouth slants down and when it’s drawn up into a thin line, how his eyes look when he’s about to yell. When he folds his eyebrows, there’s a little crease in the middle of his forehead right between them, something he longs to press his thumb to and smooth out, especially when it’s there because of him.

Once, he does, feels the skin under his own and says “If you keep making that face it’ll freeze like that”, or maybe “at this rate you’ll have wrinkles by twenty”. Whatever it is that he says, Hajime doesn’t laugh.

If anything, the crease deepens—doesn’t smooth out under his thumb because he’s always been horrible at smoothing things out, making things right—because Tooru is sitting against the wall and his right knee is burning and it feels like one wrong move will shatter everything. He’s shattered everything, ruined his own knee because he’s always been good at breaking things down into a fine powder.

Powder is so hard to hold.

The worst part of it all is that Hajime looks like he might cry. He knows that if Hajime starts crying then he’ll definitely start crying—tears have been building up behind his eyes since he started training hours ago.

Hajime hasn’t looked like this since they lost really badly to Shiratorizawa in the year of middle school, since Tooru fell out of a tree in third grade and broke his arm, since Hajime’s big best friend of a dog died—Hajime didn’t even cry when he _dislocated his shoulder_ last year. Tooru knows he’d wanted to, eyes shut tight to hold it back, but he held strong, because he’s so so strong where Tooru is not.

So if Hajime is going to cry, it means it’s bad. It means he’s fucked up Bad.

Hajime takes the hand that’s pressed against his forehead and curls his own around it. Tooru stares at the contrast between them—Hajime’s strong and steady and Tooru’s shaking.

No, that’s not right—Hajime’s is shaking, too, maybe even more than Tooru’s, little earthquake tremors he doesn’t even try to hide anymore. Hajime is so strong. His hands are shaking.

He holds his hand all the way to the hospital in the back of Hajime’s mom’s car, and he holds his hand while he sits beside the bed Tooru is curled up on, curled around his hand the way his ribs curl around his lungs and his heart, like he needs it to live.

He holds his hand while he cries, too, and doesn’t make fun of him once, whispers comforts that hang between them, soft and entirely theirs, before his mom finally shows up.

She stares at their joined hands, tired and critical, but Hajime doesn’t pull away, so neither does Tooru. His sister shows up later, Takeru trailing anxiously behind her, and doesn’t look at their hands even once, just pulls up a chair beside Hajime and whispers to him like someone whispering their last words.

Relax, he wants to say, I’m not dying. But he thinks he really might, if the doctor comes back with the worst case scenario all scrawled out on a clipboard. If he has to stop playing he doesn’t think there’s any way he could live.

The thing about stars is that when they finally do die, they explode. New galaxies are formed from what they leave behind. Or maybe it’s black holes that are formed. He’s too tired to remember right now.

(the most massive stars burn out their fuel quickly and explode in core-collapse supernovae; the least massive stars exist longer, careful as they burn; as a star explodes, it blasts all of its matter out into space; sometimes black holes are formed)

There are no stars on the ceiling.

He is not a star in any sense, because he’s burned himself out, and with his cheek pressed against white sheets, he thinks that nothing beautiful or new will come out of it.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He kisses Hajime for the first time at nearly midnight on a Thursday, huddled up together on his bed, gripping at his shoulders so hard he thinks he might be hurting him. They have classes tomorrow, but that doesn’t matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one is little more non-linearish/time skip-y, and is a little bit heavier w the allusions to csa, but again, nothing graphic, so pls do read the tags! 
> 
> also the fact that the two of them are going to separate universities rlly got me fuckt up??? god. i love these boys so much.

 

 

The thing about stars is that to be born, they are first compressed. The force of gravity compresses atoms in interstellar gas until the nuclear fusion reaction begins.

Tooru thinks that there’s one single incident that defines him. One thing at its center, that has squeezed him tight tight tight until his life took shape.

He doesn’t know whether it’s in the future or the past, whether his life has been truly shaped yet. 

(When he stops and looks back, he thinks that hands on his hair (because that always came first) and hands on his thighs (because that always came next) have defined him his whole life. That they have shaped him into what he is now—annoying, clingy, too focused on one thing, full or empty or weightless or heavy, fake and shining with a light that isn’t his own. Some kind of false star, playing pretend as the real thing.)

When he kisses Hajime for the first time, he’s gripping his shoulders so tight he thinks he might be hurting him. Hands, warm and big, slide into his hair as Hajime pushes closer. Tooru thinks of the stars, and jerks back, hitting his head on the wall behind him, heart racing. 

“Tooru?” Hajime asks, blinking, confused and kind of afraid, like Tooru could somehow change his mind about this.

Shaken, he makes himself smile, “Sorry, it’s nothing.”

“Do you not want me to touch your hair?” he asks softly. 

Tooru feels tears prick at his eyes, and shrugs. 

Hajime reaches forwards again, and cups his face instead, cradling his jaw like he’s something special. Tooru sobs into the next kiss. 

 

It isn’t as bad as it could be. 

_Three to six months without regular activity, a brace necessary even afterwards_. Three to six months off his feet, off the court, off of the one thing he lives and breathes for. It means he’ll be out for most of the season, watching from the bench when he should be on the court.

A part of him is terrified that the coach might kick him off the team. He doesn’t, of course, he’s just being stupid, but still. He’s always been terrified of being replaced, and now he’s gone and done something that could’ve had him replaced forever. The doctor said he was lucky he didn’t permanently tear something.

It isn’t as bad as it could be. That’s what Hajime tells him on the way home from the hospital, what he whispers when they’re curled around each other on Tooru’s bed (he stays the night, of course; no one, not even his mom, objected when he walked up the stairs after him.) 

It isn’t as bad as it could be. 

He could be cut off from volleyball forever, but he’s not. He’ll just have to take it a little easier in the future. Spread his practice out, not go as hard every time, save the real intensity for the real matches. 

_The thing about stars,_ Hajime whispers to him, _is that they keep on burning._

_Don’t be silly,_ Tooru whispers back. _I’m not a star._

_You’re the brightest star I’ve ever seen,_ Hajime says, firm and gentle all at once, honest and vulnerable. _You can burn right though this, too, you always do. It isn’t as bad as it could be._

Tooru thinks that he loves Hajime. He’s always known this, somewhere in the back of his mind, of his heart, some secret he kept tucked away so well even he forgot about it sometimes. (That’s a lie; he never forgot about it.) 

He thinks he’s probably done a horrible job of hiding it, his mom’s critical gaze tearing through him when he talks about Hajime, when they stay over at each other’s houses. When he was younger, he had been afraid she would tell him not to be his friend anymore, but she never did. He stayed over at the Hajime’s for dinner often, not around to bother her. 

Now that he’s older, he thinks she couldn’t stop him even if she tried. Either way, she doesn’t comment on it anymore, just watches. Gossips with the ladies at the hair salon. 

Tooru thinks that he loves Hajime, and he knows his mom doesn’t really love him, no matter what she says when she’s feels like apologizing, smoothing down the hair on the back of his neck. There’s no choice, really, between his mom and Hajime. He thinks he would pick Hajime, every time. 

(He wonders if Hajime would pick him every time too.)

 

“Are you ever gonna take those down?” Hajime asks one day. 

It’s dark out, a Friday night, and Tooru is lying on the bed, looking at the universe on his ceiling. He’d been drifting, not asleep but not really awake, either, the way he used to get when there were hands in his hair, when he was sprawled out on the gym floor at two in the morning when his body forced him to take a break. Hajime’s voice snaps him back into his body.

“No,” he says, a knee-jerk response, “I don’t know.”

Hajime raises an eyebrow, “Don’t you think you’re a little old for wishing on stars?”

“Aren’t you a little old to still have a lame Godzilla poster up in your room?” he shoots back, unnecessarily defensive but not sure how to stop. 

He can feels Hajime looking at him. Something must show on his face, on the tense lines of his body, because the light shove he expects doesn’t come. 

“Sorry,” Tooru says after a long moment. “I know it’s stupid but I just. I still like them, y’know?”

“It’s not stupid,” Hajime says, “I was just joking; I kinda like them, too. They’re very… you.”

Tooru smiles despite himself. He never can help himself around Hajime, no matter how hard he tries, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He watches the lazy shrug of Hajime’s shoulders where he’s crouched over a textbook on the floor. “It’s like you belong up there. With the stars. You always have.” 

Tooru feels a heat behind his eyes, even though nothing has happened. He’s been doing that a lot lately—salt in his eyes over stupid things. Sometimes over nothing at all. Something inside him has been cut open, the pressure that shaped him spilling and spilling out. He hasn’t told Hajime. He doesn’t know if he ever will. He doesn’t think he could stand the look on his face if he did. There’s nothing to tell him, anyways. It comes back in dreams. He pieces it together like shards of a broken mirror, and hates what he finds. 

“You’re so sappy,” he says instead of letting the pressure inside of him spill out. 

“Shut up,” Hajime grumbles, “Get your ass down here, I need help with chemistry.”

Chemistry is one of Tooru’s worst subject, but he rolls of the bed anyways, draping himself across Hajime’s lap. 

He thinks he could stay like this forever, could die like this right now, warm and content. 

The thing about stars is that they cover the sky, always shining down. He wonders if the glow-in-the-dark plastic on his ceiling is finally dimming, and wonders why he’s so scared. 

 

He still goes to practice, despite it all, despite the way he can barely put pressure on his stupid knee and the way he limps like some old man. 

He doesn’t actually practice, of course—either Hajime would kill him or he would actually ruin his knee and die—but he watches. Shouts out pointers or encouragements every once and a while and tries to keep the team’s morale up despite the worried whisper and the concerned looks the third years shoot him when they think he can’t see them. 

Still, no one seems surprised when he shows up. Hajime frowns a lot but doesn’t tell him to leave. Yahaba thanks him again and again for tips on his setting. 

(He likes Yahaba, always has—he had showed up for tryouts with only a year or two of experience under his belt, and Tooru had met him the second time in the rain a few days later, after school, waiting for his sister to pick him up.

_You have three years to get better at it,_ he’d said when Yahaba told him he might not join because he “wasn’t very good anyways”—which was stupid, because his tosses had been good. A little rusty, shaky, not quite polished off, but there was _potential_ there, something waiting to be pulled out and shaped into something beautiful. 

The kid had shown up at first practice later that week, and Tooru felt something like excitement? pride? something warm. He was glad he’d shown up. And it wasn’t bad to have someone who kind of maybe looked up to him. He always did have a thing for praise.)

Something inside him aches everyday, sitting there on the bench and watching his teammates improve without him. Some days he’s so afraid they’ll leave him behind he’s tempted to fuck it all and jump right back in. He doesn’t, because that would be stupid and he doesn’t want to be off the court forever, but the want is still there. 

It’s worse at games. He sits with the coaches and talks strategy—they value his input, which is. Nice. Intimidating, but nice. He still wears the jersey, even though he’s not playing. 

( _You’re still a member of the team, stupid,_ Hajime had said when he shoved the thing at him.)

The thing about stars is that they burn out. Tooru is not a star, but he is still afraid of burning out.

And he’s trying, he’s trying so so hard not to, but sometimes it feels like he might burst from all the anticipation building up inside him, all the wants and fears and anxieties that come with being a bystander, from being _outside_. 

He’s always hated being on the outside. 

 

Things keep moving forwards. Time goes by. Three to six months turns out to be five months and about a week. 

When he finally holds the ball in his hands again, he feels like he’s coming home. He can breath easy. His bones are empty, like a bird’s, and he feels like he could fly if he wanted to. 

 

He knows he’s a valuable player. He’s spent half his life trying to mold himself into a valuable player. A powerful player. A nearly irreplaceable setter, one of the best of his age.

He knows he’s a valuable player, but the thing about stars is that sometimes when they burn out, they lose their grip on their solar system—most of the time their solar system is destroyed along with them. Tooru isn’t a star in any sense, but he does think he wears down the people he’s caught in his orbit. If he’s burned out he’s already lost them.

Something clenches in his stomach when he sees Hajime laughing with other people, smiling that smile that makes his heart ache. It’s a stupid, petty jealousy, childish and ugly, but it’s real. It’s years of insecurities bubbling up and probably some kind of abandonment issues. He hates it, but it’s his. He can’t get rid of it, no matter how many times he tries.

He knows he has a bad personality, been told multiple times by multiple people, but that doesn’t matter, because he’s a valuable player. It’s when his fears get the best of him that he wishes he were a better person, somehow, that he wasn’t petty and rude at his worst and annoying at best. He doesn’t know how to be a better person. 

And he hates voicing this to Hajime—whispering his insecurities into the phone at night, telling him he’s afraid he’ll leave him soon, because it feels. Manipulative. He knows he’s petty, and childish, and rude, but he never _ever_ wants to be manipulative, hands smoothing out the hair against the back of his neck or digging into his shoulder—especially not to Hajime. Never to Hajime. 

He’s so afraid of being something he doesn’t wanna be that sometimes he doesn’t tell Hajime the things that bother him—which is stupid because Haijme always finds out in the end, and always feels bad when it has something to do with him. And then Tooru is wondering if keeping it to himself is more manipulative than saying it outright, and it’s all a big mess he spirals down into full speed.

He tries to fix it with practice and the feeling of the ball in his hand—Hajime’s other friends or whoever he talks and laughs with when he gets tired of Tooru don’t matter, because he is in control of his serves and his tosses and he’s gonna go places with this, he’s gonna be first, be best, be something amazing. 

It works until Hajime shows up and drags him to the bench and shoves food and water at him like a man on a mission. 

Tooru has all of Hajime’s expressions down flat. Mouth slanted down, eyes tired and concerned and bright, but not in the way that means he’s gonna yell. There’s a little crease in his forehead, right in between his eyebrows. Tooru wants to press his thumb to it and smooth it out, but that didn’t work the last time they were in the gym like this, so it probably won’t work now. 

“What’s wrong?” Hajime asks eventually, voice soft in that way reserved only for him. “Come on, I hate seeing you fuck yourself up like this.” 

Something inside him has been cut open, bleeding memories long hidden and hazy stars on his ceiling that make him sick sometimes, something soft and vulnerable, and so maybe that’s why his resolve cracks.

“You’re not. You won’t… leave, right? For some girl or a new friend or something? I don’t—I don’t want you to leave.”

He hates the way his voice shakes. Hajime is silent for only a moment.

“What are you talking about?” he asks, “I won’t just abandon you for no reason, I’m not that much of an asshole.” 

Like always, like always, Tooru smiles despite himself. He thinks he could by dying and Hajime could make him smile just from being around him. Suddenly, everything is better. Of course Hajime won’t just leave him. He’s a nice person. 

“So you’re saying you’re _kind of_ an asshole?” 

Hajime rolls his eyes, but his hand finds Tooru’s anyways and he holds it tight. 

 

He’s lived in this house all his life. Never lived in a bedroom without the stars above him. It was inevitable that he would fall in love with them. 

They’d never ever moved, is the thing, stayed in the same house, same room, same bed—the same bed. Different sheets and pillows over the years, but it was sturdy and so it was enough. He still sleeps in the same bed. Hands in his hair and on his thighs and the stars still shining above him. 

He thinks that the stars have shaped his life—it’s only the stars, he tells himself late at night. Only the stars, hazy above him when he would slip into his room and drag a calloused hand up and up and up—they took Tooru away, to a universe that belonged only to him. 

He dreams about it, sometimes, the same dreams that leaves him feeling dirty and scared, have him running a shower in the middle of the night and scrubbing until his skin is pink and raw. His mother scrubs her hands the same way, after she touches his shoulder or smooths his hair back—he’s always known he is something dirty and bad. Only now he knows _why_.

During the day, he forgets about it. 

He doesn’t _forget_ , but he doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t want to. What’s done is done. He can’t change anything, so there’s no point in crying over it. Dreams are enough, flinching when someone sneaks up on him, glow-in-the-dark stars dancing behind his eyelids when he tries to sleep. 

Some days he’s so full he feels like he might burst. Some days he’s empty. 

Sometimes he’s so tired it feels like all the air in his room is pressing down on him, trying to force him to sleep, but he just. Can’t. Most of the time he’s thinking about things that don’t matter, and sometimes he’s thinking about nothing at all. Sometimes all he can do is stare up at the stars and remember how they used to look hazy and far away. Most of the time he tries to remember nothing at all.

The thing about stars is that they’re very very far away from Earth. When he was young, he would lean out of his window and wish he was very very far away, too. Sometimes he would stare at the ground instead. 

Once Hajime told him to _get away from the window, don’t you know what’ll happen if you fall?_ He wasn’t stupid—he knew what would happen if he hit the ground. Sometimes he wondered what it would feel like, the same way he wondered what it would be like to burn like a star.

He read somewhere that everyone is made up of stardust. 

He wonders: if he tried to fly away, would he find his way back to the stars, or fall and sink into the ground? 

 

This is where they lose. 

Tooru pours himself into everything he does. This time he thinks that maybe he just didn’t pour enough. 

His team cries— _Hajime_ cries, heavy honest tears that make Tooru ache, almost make him cry, too. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t think he could if he tried. He landed on his bad knee when he hit the tables jumping for that last toss, but even that doesn’t push him over the edge.

He feels. Empty. He knows it’ll hit him later, he knows he’ll cry and regret every play he made, but for now, there’s nothing about the game that he takes back. 

If nothing else, he’s glad he tossed to Hajime, at the end of it all. 

The thing about stars is that to be born, they are first compressed. The atoms have to be put under enough pressure to kickstart the fusion reaction. Looking at Yahaba, the second years and first years, he knows that this loss will make stars out of them. 

“Don’t ever forget this sight,” Yahaba says, Karasuno laughing like children just across the court, and Tooru thinks that the raw potential he saw a year ago has barely begun to surface. 

Everyone is made of stardust, but few have enough in them to become stars themselves. His team will become so much more than what they are now, and it will be incredible. 

(It does hit him, later, harder than he thought it would. Hajime is there of course, holding him steady through it all, just like he’s done since they were kids. The loss settles into his chest, regret like tar sticking to his ribs, filling him up and weighing him down until he feels like he will never be able to move again.

Looking back, he know that he wasn’t crying so much about the game, but more about the fact that it was the last game they’ll ever play with their team. Those days are over, now, sneakers on the gym floor and victory yells and the sounds the crowd makes when he’s about to serve. It’s over. That was it.)

(I’m gonna miss it, he thinks, head buried in the crook of Hajime’s neck, I’m gonna miss it so much.)

 

He kisses Hajime for the first time at nearly midnight on a Thursday, huddled up together on his bed, gripping at his shoulders so hard he thinks he might be hurting him. They have classes tomorrow, but that doesn’t matter. 

“Tooru,” Hajime says when he cups his face instead of touching his hair, voice soft, thin like he’s in awe, like he could ever be in awe over someone like him, “Tooru, how long?”

Tooru shrugs, tracing the slant of Hajime’s shoulders, “I don’t know, middle school? Earlier?” he laughs weakly, “A long time.” 

Hajime laughs, too, something wet and disbelieving, “God, me too. We’re so stupid, aren’t we?” 

“Yeah,” Tooru agrees, leaning into Hajime’s hand, warm where he wipes at his eyes, more elated than he’s ever ever felt before, “We are. But I love you, so it’s okay.” 

He feels Hajime’s breath catch, pulse jump against his hand, and then he’s kissing him again, hungry and warm and soft all at once, enough to make Tooru’s heart race but not overwhelm him. Perfection at its height. He thinks they’re both crying, now, but that’s okay, too. 

“I love you, too,” Hajime whispers, Tooru’s saving grace and everything he’s ever yearned for, breath hot enough to keep him warm and safe forever, “I love you too.”

The stars shine dully above them, forgotten. 

 

“What?” Tooru asks, breathless and disbelieving. 

Hajime bites his lip, shifts a little where he sits, “I didn’t apply,” he repeats, “to any of the colleges you did. At least not the ones in Tokyo.” 

There is silence. 

“Oh,” Tooru says eventually, the word forced out because he knows he needs to say something. “Um. Did you get accepted anywhere?”

More silence; Tooru isn’t sure if it’s lighter or heavier than the last one. 

“Yeah,” Hajime says, “A few places, actually.”

Something twists in Tooru when he says it, something sharp and painful, piercing through his ribcage and straight into his lungs. He knows it’s childish—they’ll be in college soon; it’s time to stop relying on his best friend to keep him upright, it’s time to _grow up already._

He knows it’s childish. Some childish part of him always clung to the idea that they would be together forever—it had been that way their whole lives, so why wouldn’t it stay that way? Childish, but real. 

Hajime isn’t looking at him, eyes darting everywhere but his face like he thinks Tooru is mad at him. He’s not mad. He’s just. A little sad, maybe, that Hajime didn’t tell him about it until now, until after Tooru has already applied to all the universities he could. 

(He stops himself from thinking that if Hajime had just told him sooner, they could’ve gone to the same college after all, because he knows that’s exactly why Hajime didn’t tell him. _Don’t throw away your opportunities for anyone else_ , he had said to him once.)

He wonders, for a moment, what would happen if he started crying, let the tears he feels stinging his eyes fall, if he begged him not to go. He’s disgusted, right after, at himself and every thought he’s ever had, even the idea of guilt tripping Hajime. 

_Manipulative,_ something screams. 

This isn’t wanting sweets on the way home from school or begging him to spend the night. This is serious. This is their future. His heart beats like a dying bird’s.

He pushes those bad bad thoughts away and wipes at his eyes and says “That’s—that’s great, Hajime. I’m happy for you.”

Hajime finally looks at him, searches his face for something Tooru hopes he doesn’t find. 

“Hey, don’t cry,” he says softly, which actually makes it harder not to.

“I’m not.”

“You are,” in that honest way of his that’s seen through Tooru’s bullshit since they were off catching beetles in the park together. 

Tooru says nothing—caught in a lie again, always transparent to Hajime. 

“But hey,” Hajime starts, drawing Tooru’s eyes up, “I was thinking… we could still move in together. Like, we could find an apartment halfway between the two or something. I dunno about you, but I don’t really wanna share a dorm with a stranger.”

“I could get a secret psycho killer for a roommate.” Tooru mumbles in agreement, dangerously hopeful. 

Hajime snorts, but smiles, “Or Ushiwaka.”

“God, that’s even _worse_ ,” and then they’re laughing again, Hajime’s arm thrown over his shoulder. 

“So what do you think?” Hajime asks, eyes crinkled around the edges the way they do when they soften.

The thing about stars is that they almost always drag something into their orbit, whether they try to or not. Tooru thinks that maybe Hajime is the star, and Tooru is the one forever caught in his orbit, fated to circle him forever. He also thinks that he’s okay with that. There’s no one he would rather be stuck with.

“It sounds nice,” Tooru says quietly, almost frighteningly happy, “It sounds really nice.”

Hajime smiles.

 

The season is over, the last season of their high school career. 

They’ll be graduating and headed to college soon, so Tooru’s sister decides another Spring Cleaning is necessary before they do. Hajime comes over to help this time, because the weekend before Tooru helped him clean out his bedroom closet, which was a feat in and of itself—eighty percent of the clothes he owned as a kid were basketball shorts. 

There’s not much to get rid of, this time around. The kitchen is spotless and the couch is rarely touched. His mom’s room is still unknown. His sister decides to tackle the garage again—something new shows up in there every time you check—which leaves the two of them the bedroom and two bathrooms. 

“You still have this?” Hajime asks. Tooru looks back to see the big space book from the library, old and dusty, in his hands. 

“Oh,” Tooru says, “I think I just forgot I still had it.” Which is true, probably. He hasn’t thought about it for a long time. The last time he held it was years ago, anxiously flipping through the pages to find the supernovae. 

“Huh,” Hajime says, and then tosses it onto the bed. 

Tooru stares at it for a long moment—he wants to feel its spine, skim the Table of Contents, trace Saturn’s rings, but he also doesn’t ever want to touch it again. He turns away. 

“Hey,” Hajime says later, after he’s tossed out a heap of crumpled up papers and old candy wrappers, leaning on the doorframe, “Are you ever gonna take those down?” 

Tooru pauses where he’s busy folding clothes and packing them carefully away, smoothing them out under his hands. He doesn’t have to ask what he’s talking about.

_No,_ he almost says. Makes himself lean back and look up at the fading plastic light. They barely shine anymore, old as they are. He used to see constellations in them, but now he just sees the imperfections in the plaster behind them. 

He thinks about the old library book at the bottom of the thrift store pile, how it used to get him through the days and darker nights and how he won’t ever see it again once it’s gone.

“Yeah,” he says eventually, slow and clear, “Yeah, I think I will. I don’t need them anymore.”

 

Tooru has a lot of moments to describe Hajime, but his most favorite one is this: 

It’s somewhere in their third year, after their first win against Karasuno but before their last loss; Tooru’s mom is out of town, he isn’t sure where, and so Hajime is free to stay over as long as he wants, which is all night. 

It’s a Saturday, probably, nothing special and Hajime is lounging on the couch, Tooru’s head in his lap, some bad horror movie playing in the background. There are warm fingers tracing the curve of skin behind his ear—not running through his hair, because Hajime knows enough not to, by now—soothing and soft, lulling him into that warm space between awareness and sleep. 

It’s nice. Hajime made dinner earlier because he’s always been the better cook, and so Tooru feels sated and sleepy and safe, sprawled out on the couch he only uses when Hajime is over. His mom hardly ever uses it either, just keeps the TV on as background noise when she cleans or has friends over, so it’s like it’s their spot—he and Hajime’s. It’s only for them.

It startles something in him, that thought. It’s theirs. He thinks that he’s never felt safer than he feels right now, and it moves something in him. 

“Are you okay?” he hears Hajime ask; he blinks out of his thoughts to turn and gaze up at him. Despite himself, he feels tears gather behind his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says, voice breaking just a bit. Hajime doesn’t look convinced, so he continues, “I’m just… happy, I guess. I’m happy.”

Hajime’s eyes soften, crinkling around the edges in that way that makes Tooru want to cup his face, run his thumbs over the soft skin under his eyes—he does it, just because he can now, reaches up and pulls him down into a soft soft kiss that still manages to take his breath away. It’s an awkward angle, but they make it work, because that’s what they do.

“I’m happy, too,” Hajime says when he pulls back, and then a fond “You cry too much,” when Tooru wipes at his eyes. 

“I know,” he laughs, eyes fluttering shut as a soft thumb wipes a tear away. 

The thing about stars is that they burn themselves out. When they do, they explode, sometimes become a black hole, sometimes spread themselves out to let new things form in the universe from what they leave behind. 

Tooru doesn’t think himself a star in any sense, but Hajime does. He’s burned himself out, but maybe, he thinks. Maybe something beautiful and new has come out of it after all. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> a flower blooms and a puppy is born w every comment
> 
> [now w a [playlist](https://8tracks.com/ohmygodwhy/future-king/) ]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [stardust in your eyes but blood on your hands](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16342493) by [chaoticsandstorm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticsandstorm/pseuds/chaoticsandstorm)




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